


annunciation

by elftrash



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Body Horror, Gil-galad: the quest for origins, Implied Mpreg, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 05:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21156344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elftrash/pseuds/elftrash
Summary: Eru moves to make light out of darkness, to take wrong and make right, to weave new harmonies out of dissonance.Or: Beleriand has driven them all a little mad, Angband or not.





	annunciation

Maglor knows that something has gone badly wrong from the moment he ride in from the Gap. Himring’s guard are far too relieved to see him.

“What is it?”

“My lord?” says the soldier he knows to be one of Maedhros’s best men.

“Something’s not right,” Maglor says, and glances around the bailey. The Fëanorian star is still flying from the battlements. Everyone seems to be in their places, the keep fully manned. There’s no sign of a recent attack. “What’s happened?”

The soldier says nothing, keeping Maedhros’s secrets. That means a personal disaster, not a military one. 

Maglor turns his gaze to a less hardened face. “Report.”

“All is well,” the younger one he’s picked on says, then falters. “But prince Maedhros is not… He’s not well, my lord.”

“An injury?”

“No, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“His rooms,” the younger one says, and then, “He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“He’ll admit _me_.”

-

Maglor finds his brother standing by the window, face turned to the East and long red hair streaming around his shoulders.

Nothing looks wrong with him. He’s pale, but Maedhros is always pale. Grim, but Maedhros is always grim now, since Thangorodrim. 

He used to laugh. In Tirion before the exile he was known for the charm of his smile. 

Maedhros doesn’t turn. Maglor might be lulled by the calm of his features, his stillness, but there’s an unsheathed knife in his brother’s hand.

“You’re frightening your men,” he says, leaning against the doorway.

“If they’re frightened of me, they’re of little use holding the East against Morgoth,” Maedhros says unsparingly. “I’m not – _quite_ – an Orc.”

“What’s happened?”

“Oh,” Maedhros says. “Many things.” He turns his head at last, and his eyes are palest grey, hard as steel. “Fingon visited.”

The only person Maedhros still finds his old smile for is Fingon. It follows that cloud will succeed the sun after Fingon returns to Hithlum. A depression is expected. And yet: “How long ago was that? You were expecting him any day when I was last here.”

“Some weeks.”

Longer than the mood usually lingers. “Did you quarrel?”

“Hardly.”

“What is it, then?” Maglor dares to come a step closer, and then another. He’s almost in reaching distance. “Your men are all white about the eyes, like spooked horses. Have you been shouting at them?”

“What would be the point?” Maedhros says. “Stop prying, Maglor. You can’t help.”

“Give me the knife.”

“No.”

“Why do you need it?” Maglor asks, changing tacks. “What do you want it for?”

Maedhros grimaces at him, then lays the knife down on the windowsill. 

Taking it as a surrender, Maglor reaches out for it, and falls into his brother’s trap when Maedhros seizes his wrist. Maglor expects him to fling it, him, away, but instead he’s jerked closer when Maedhros pulls the hand he’s captured to his stomach, shoving it against the flat plane of his abdomen.

Maedhros has always been slim. After Thangorodrim, he was skin stretched over bone, absolutely spare. There was nothing soft left about him, even his hair cropped unforgivingly away from his skull. He regained his muscle in the years afterwards, drilling with the sword, but not the softness. 

Through his undertunic, his stomach is flat as a board, and as hard. 

“Am I mad?” Maedhros says, his voice barely a whisper now. “Is it me? I can feel it.”

“Feel _what_?”

Maedhros lets his wrist go. “Not that way, then. Try with your mind. Can you feel it now?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” Maglor says helplessly, but he opens his mind, something he rarely does now, and reaches out for his brother. 

The walls around Maedhros’s mind are steely, too, but thin as tissue. Through them he can hear the tumult in Maedhros’s head, the fury. The precise nature of it is still opaque to him, but when Maedhros murmurs “Not me. Broader,” Maglor lets his awareness spread to take in the whole room, the floors below – the keep – 

And for a moment he feels something strange, a flicker of – he can’t tell. It’s like something seen out of the corner of his mental eye. Trying to focus on it makes it disappear entirely.

Maedros smiles. It’s a terrible thing, wholly mirthless, with none of the joy of the one he gives only to Fingon. “So I’m not mad,” he says. “That’s – some sort of consolation, I suppose. At least I have that certainty.”

“What _is_ it?” 

“I’d rather not find out,” Maedhros says, and then he’s going for the knife. He turns it inwards before Maglor makes sense of the action, the sudden flash of steel; and then he’s lurching forward, trying to reach it, and they go rolling across the floor.

Maedhros is taller than him, but he has only one hand, and he’s already wounded. The knife had scored his belly before Maglor sent it clattering bloodily across the flagstones. They fight each other silently, brutally, without limits. Maglor doesn’t care if he hurts his brother as long as he stops him, and Maedhros cares only about reaching the knife and using it. 

It’s a vicious fight, one that ends with black eyes and twisted noses and Maglor pinning his brother to the floor with the help of a savage knee to Maedhros’s wounded gut that makes him scream horribly and convulse, his grip loosening. Blood is everywhere, blooming through Maedhros’s clothes and dripping from Maglor’s nose. 

“Let me _go_,” Maedhros pants, face a rictus and too many teeth bared.

“And let you disembowel yourself?”

“Better let me while I have the will to do it. You wouldn’t have the – _stomach_ for it, little brother.”

His eyes are moving, back and forth, between Maglor’s face and the trajectory of the knife, calculating angles, waiting for Maglor to slacken. Maedhros still has his bad moments, but they’re never this violent. Even in the months directly after Thangorodrim. Fingon had been there by the lake, able to calm him. Fingon isn’t here now.

“I’m sorry,” Maglor says, and he means it. 

Then he starts to sing, a sleeping-song, thick with power. It’s the unkindest of tools, the unfairest, and tuned to Maedhros’s vulnerabilities like the knife had been, designed to slide into his mind and overwhelm it. There’s a thread of their mother’s remembered voice in it, the way she hummed in the back of her throat when she was working in her atelier, or cradling one of their little brothers to sleep, and the faintest echo of Fëanor’s deep burr when they were very, very young, and he was still proud of them.

It’s the sea at Alqualondë on a fair day before a sword or pike ever shone there, and the gentle fountains of the Great Court in Tirion. It’s a stolen snatch of Fingon singing to himself by the fire, to the accompaniment of the little harp on his knee, his body relaxed from a day of hunting.

Slowly, steadily, his brother’s body softens, the cord-like muscles going lax under him. Maedhros is still glaring in agonized betrayal when his face goes slack too and his eyes distant.

It’s not a fair weapon.

It’s not one Maglor likes to use. 

Still.

-

Maedhros’s bloodstained shirt makes an immediate bandage for the gut wound, which, thankfully, hadn’t managed to pierce through muscle to viscera. Maglor lays him out on his back in his bed and secures his left arm by the wrist to the bedpost. 

After a moment’s thought, he lashes the right, abbreviated arm under his brother’s left armpit. 

For the moment, that’s safe enough. If Maedhros wakes from his violence chastened, the episode will be contained, for now, although Maglor won’t be heading back to the Gap until he’s certain. If Maedhros wakes still gripped by the same madness – 

He can’t keep his brother bound for long. He can’t leave Himring’s defence crippled like that, which is a horrible calculation, but the one that must be made. Even if this is temporary, he’s going to have to manage which of Maedhros’s men know very carefully. 

If his brother wakes still mad – 

-

Maedhros’s most loyal, taciturn captain is the one in charge in his absence or incapacity. Of course he is.

“My lord,” is all he says to Maglor’s demand to dispatch riders: one to the Gap, one to Thargelion, and one to Dor-lomin. 

“Your very _best_ horses,” Maglor emphasises. “The fastest.”

The captain keeps his eyes clear of the blood on Maglor's hands and riding leathers, splashed across his battered leather cuirass. “Of course.”

“I’ll be taking over the command here until he’s better.”

Now his eyes linger on the blood deliberately. “My lord –?”

“He is well,” Maglor says. He is not well. “At _once_, captain.”

-

He keeps Maedhros asleep as long as he reasonably can. He allows no one else into his brother’s rooms. He makes a better job of the hasty field-dressing he’d given Maedhros’s injury. He orders men stationed beyond the door, close enough to call for aid. 

He guards Maedhros’s long sleep. 

Three days later, he realises Maedhros is looking at him, eyes shining grey slits under his eyelids.

“Brother,” Maglor says carefully. 

“Makalaurë,” Maedhros says. There’s another small spasm of the kind that must have caught his attention in the first place, Maedhros testing his bonds. “This is not a comfortable position.”

“I imagine not.”

“Unbind me?”

“I can’t do that just yet,” Maglor says. He’s removed everything that could be an immediate weapon from the rooms, but he knows his brother too well to doubt his ingenuity. If Maedhros wants to harm himself, he’ll do it. 

“_Makalaurë_,” Maedhros says, and his voice does not have Maglor’s power, and never has, but he uses it like a weapon nonetheless. He sounds so reasonable. He sounds like the brother Maglor has known all his life, the brother he once had: the calm, put-upon prince of Tirion.

Maglor says, “Tell me about the knife.”

“What knife?”

“The one you were going to use on yourself,” Maglor says. “The one you _did_ use on yourself.” 

“Unbind me, and I will.”

Maglor clicks his tongue. “You ought to have kept up the pretence of lost memory longer. I might have believed you’d suffered some sort of episode that was now safely over.”

“You wouldn’t have.”

“No, probably not.”

“Maglor,” Maedhros says, and now he’s not speaking as the beloved older brother, the companion of his youth but in the cold, commanding voice of their dispossessed king, the leader of their house, the head of the military command in the East. “_Unbind me_.”

Maglor shakes his head. 

Maedhros lets command go. He thrashes in the bed, he pulls at the linen strips imprisoning him, he batters and rages, and the bindings tighten on his right wrist and left forearm until the skin is welted and red, swelling around the strips, and fresh blood is seeping through the bandages at his middle.

Maglor does nothing, and eventually, like a storm breaking, the rage stops.

Neither of them speak for some time.

Then Maedhros says, hoarse but sane, “You can’t plan to bind me thus forever.”

“No,” Maglor agrees. 

“What _is_ your plan?”

“Tell me about the knife.”

The curses Maedhros heaps upon him then are unspeakably foul, delivered in a flat, hostile voice that sounds like a stranger's, and which with brutal precision flays into every remembered weakness Maglor has ever shown him, from earliest childhood to the unhealed wound of the long years that Maedhros hung on Thangorodrim, all the long years in which Maglor camped by Lake Mithrim and did nothing.

It hurts.

It would hurt less if Maglor could tell himself his brother doesn’t mean it, or that he doesn’t deserve it. Maedhros has never accepted either his apologies or his self-blame, and Maglor had come to believe that to speak of the matter at all was to lay another burden on his brother. He'd stopped trying - but he has never been able to believe that Maedhros doesn’t blame him for those years of inertia, even if he won't say so. 

Now he's saying so. But eventually even the blame stops, too.

Night has fallen. The starlight through the window to the East is light enough for this room, this struggle.

“I didn’t mean any of that,” Maedhros says at last.

“I think you did.”

“I don’t blame you,” his brother says, and this is the most dangerous gambit of all, the one Maglor would most wish to believe. “I never have. I may have longed for you to come, but I never expected you to try to save me – and if you had, you would have betrayed the trust I placed in you, and threatened the safety and survival of our people. You did what was right.”

“How can it have been right?” Maglor says. He has been weeping silently since Maedhros began. Perhaps the grief shows in his voice a little. “Fingon wasn’t in Beleriand long enough to _bathe_ before he set out after you. I tarried ten years in Hithrim building _houses_ and _alliances_ and hoping you were mercifully dead. He went after you with a harp, a bow, and a dagger – who ought to have come after you with a harp, if not I?”

“You did what was right,” Maedhros repeats in his commander-king voice. The grim one, the cold one, the one from after Thangorodrim. 

“I left you to worse than death.”

“I survived.”

“If Fingon hadn’t loved you beyond madness, you might still be suffering.”

“Or I might be dead,” Maedhros says. “And my death would have been a mercy.”

“The time for such mercy was over three hundred years ago,” Maglor says. “Why do you seek it now?”

“Did you think my suffering was ended when Fingon came for me?”

How could anyone have thought that?

Maglor has watched his brother learn to fight again with the only hand remaining to him, drilling day and night, his eyes like pale flame. He also watched his brother despair at the simple things that had been taken from him: the ability to dress himself, to lace his boots with swift ease, to write fluidly and without cramping, in the beautiful flowing script their father had created but Maedhros mastered. To smile and mean it, to laugh, to show softness to anyone but Fingon, who loved him beyond madness, and was therefore loved beyond madness in turn.

Because the threat of madness was there, always at bay, in the too-bright eyes, the tall too-thin body honed to whipcord leanness, the endless drilling, the endless watch, the denial of joy. It had never come on in the form of a knife before, that Maglor knew, but there had been times when Himring was dark and fearful, its commander’s mood making itself felt through the thick stone walls, times when his brother didn’t sleep, or slept only to wake screaming. 

“No,” he says. “No, Nelyo, I’ve never thought that.”

“Well, I thought it might have,” Maedhros says, and gives the harsh bark that serves him for a laugh these days. “It will never be as though it didn’t happen, but I thought, perhaps, that _fresh_ tortures were past – that my mind was my own, however fractured a thing it was, that my body was a weapon obedient to my will again.”

They’d learned the long and difficult lesson of what happened to Morgoth’s captives together, these three hundred years past. The Noldor had learned that they couldn’t trust their own people, once they had been under Morgoth’s hand, however familiar their faces, tragic their eyes, plaintive their begging. They had seen Morgoth move within people they had trusted, had loved, had thought rescued beyond hope the way Maedhros himself had been: had seen them gone sly, or treacherous, or foul. 

That was the better way for Morgoth’s taint to reveal itself. The worst was when his former captives still looked at you with horror at what they were doing, had done, had been done to them; when they wept even while they betrayed you, or as they slit the throats of those they had loved, or came at you with a knife still begging to be forgiven.

They had all learned that no one could be taken back from Morgoth, however strong or clever or kind or loved they had been. They had learned to keep their gates closed. They had learned to deliver merciful deaths with an arrow or a blade, and, sometimes, a prayer. 

Maedhros alone had come back untainted. He had never been meant for freedom. That was why he had been spared. He hadn’t been _released_ by Morgoth or one of his foul lieutenants. Fingon had snatched him from the prolonged agony that had been intended for him, Fëanor’s son in the hands of Fëanor’s great enemy. No hidden instructions had been written in his mind, no hooked cantrips placed, no hidden explosives buried.

“I felt nothing in your mind!” Maglor insists now. “You’ve harmed no one here. You would have delivered Himring whole to them, any time these three hundred years, if they had the power to reach out and touch you.”

“Oh, I’m not mad,” Maedhros agrees. “It’s inside _me_, not my head.” 

“I felt nothing!”

“Do you think I wouldn’t recognise the violation of my body?”

They have never talked about Thangorodrim’s tortures. Maedhros has never allowed it. On very, very rare occasions, he will make some sideways comment that Maglor has learned not to respond to or acknowledge in any way. In this way, and in this way only, small snatches of information sometimes leak through the iron box Maedhros has placed all memory of those ten years within.

Is he truly saying – 

“Did they,” Maglor says. “Did they –”

“Oh, no,” Maedhros says. “I live, don’t I? Not _that_: not that I know of. Morgoth was a Vala, after all. I’m not sure he’s aware of the flesh in that way. He knows how to hurt – as he hurts – he _burns_, Maglor – but he doesn’t have the creativity for more than mere pain. Sauron is the artist there, infinitely pettier than his master, infinitely worse. He spent so long perfecting his craft while Morgoth was still bound; corrupting flesh, breeding Orcs. I think that must be what he meant for me.”

“You’re no Orc.”

“I think he planned a long revenge,” Maedhros says, ignoring him. “He did – _things_ to me. He had plans for my hröa that were thwarted first by Morgoth, and then by Fingon. I think he set a seed in my flesh and waited, and now it flowers.”

“Why now?” Maglor is trying to use his own military voice, to speak as Commander of the Gap, of the most vulnerable pass in the East, as a man who briefly wore the crown himself. 

If this isn’t madness, intelligence is what matters, not agony, not revulsion. Not love. “Why would Sauron wait all these years? Are they planning an attack?”

Maedhros barks his not-laugh again. “In Angband there is no ‘why’, Maglor. You would know that – if you’d ever been there.” That hurts. “Things are evil and appalling for no reason. It is an end in itself.” He adds, kindly, “You see why I need the knife.”

Maglor says, “Not without being sure.”

“You would wait for my degradation? You would wait until I lost sense and judgment and the ability to render myself that mercy?”

“I would wait to know for certain,” Maglor says. “I’ve sent word –”

Maedhros tenses in his bindings. “Not –”

“Thargelion. Not Himlad.”

Curufin and Celegorm are barely governable as it is, and any sign of weakness in Maedhros will be to them an opportunity to slip their leashes. They’re wolves gone wild in Beleriand, and since the day Maedhros ceded kingship to Fingolfin, they’ve been waiting.

Beleriand has driven them all a little mad, Angband or not. 

-

In the morning the sun is coming through the window, faintly rosy-gold, and Maedhros says, sounding very strange, “I think – I dreamed.”

Maglor had slept on the floor by his bed. He’d heard no screaming. “A good dream?”

“I saw its face. The child’s.”

_What child_, Maglor wants to ask, but he knows. They’d been so very carefully talking around it. Now he wants to bind up Maedhros’s mouth as well as his wrists. “A child? Not an Orcling?”

“It looked like Fingon. I saw his face! His eyes were like stars.” 

His brother looks strange, too, and it takes Maglor a few moments to decipher why. Maedhros looks more peaceful than he has since they arrived in Beleriand. He looks calm, even lashed to his own bed, his red hair dark with sweat. The corner of his mouth is curved up, not down.

“That doesn’t sound like something Sauron could craft.”

“No.”

“It’s not a very good story,” Maglor says, “if you’re trying to convince me to untie you by it.”

“It’s not a story. There is a child. Gil-galad. That’s the name I will give him. For his shining eyes, and his shining shield.”

“It doesn’t have a shield yet.”

“He will.” Maedhros sounds certain. “Sauron meant to engender something awful in me, but his work was interrupted, and the field left fallow; so instead he has wrought his own doom.”

“The babe will kill him?”

“It'll help,” Maedhros says. “He won’t kill him outright, but he’ll help weaken him, very badly, and that will lead to his end. It won’t happen, not like it must, without him.”

“You’re just trying to convince me that you won’t hack the thing out the moment you’re loose.”

“I still want it _out of me_,” Maedhros says, and the dreaminess fades. "The thought of it makes me ill. Not only in body, in spirit. I wasn’t made for this: I wasn’t meant for it. Sauron _did it_ to me, even if he himself didn’t start the child. It’s a wrong note in the Song. But now I know its fate, I won’t harm it or have it harmed.” 

Just listening to his brother speak like this is making Maglor himself ill. “Try not to tear your wound open again today,” he says finally. “I’m going to wash and then I’ll redress it.”

-

Caranthir arrives at Himring long before Fingon, a week after being sent for. If it becomes necessary, Maglor will make sure that it’s all over before Fingon arrives. He hopes it won’t be. 

He always hopes. That’s one of the many things that separate him and Maedhros.

Caranthir’s horse is filthy and laddered with sweat. Caranthir himself is not much better. He’s never particularly put-together, but his dark hair is ruffled worse than usual from the wind, his breastplate battered under his heavy cloak. Under ordinary circumstances Maglor would send him to wash first. 

“Come up,” Maglor says instead as soon as his brother has dismounted in the inner courtyard. 

It’s unduly curt, but it’s Caranthir, so no offense is taken.

Maedhros’s soldiers are watching them. They must be wondering what’s going on: why Maedhros hasn’t left his rooms in a week, why Maglor stays shut up with him, why another of their lord’s brothers has come riding in. They must guess how ill things are with him, but not the cause.

Maedhros’s soldiers are loyal. Too loyal, and they have learned their hard lessons at Maedhros’s knee. If he tells one of them to untie him, to give him the knife, to wield it themselves, they’ll do it. 

Caranthir nods, tossing his reins at one of his own men. It’s a small squadron he’s brought with him, not enough to impoverish Thargelion. Not quite enough to wrest control of Himring outright, but enough to matter, if it becomes necessary. “His rooms?”

“Yes.”

They don’t speak on the stairs. They don’t need to. Maglor’s message had been, necessarily, terse and limited, but Caranthir is not a fool, and a demand that he come to Himring as quickly as possible and with a small guard is one he can read as clearly as if Maglor had gone on for pages. 

“How bad?”

“I don’t know. I’m hoping you will.”

It might still be madness, after all, whatever Maedhros says. Or thralldom. It would make more sense for Morgoth and Sauron to attack his mind than his body, the steely will holding them all together and in harness. 

It could be both.

He hopes it’s only madness.

Caranthir’s lip curls with dislike for the task. He doesn’t like reading people. He has no finesse at it, and his mental walls are thicker than anyone Maglor has ever met. He lowers them for almost no one, and therefore crashes around the world like he’s missing a sense, clumsy as a moth bashing against a light. It’s love and loyalty both that means he’ll do it for Maedhros.

Really, the person they need here is Finrod, with his delicate touch and skillful probing, his clear sight, his empathy: but if they alert Finrod, they alert everyone. Finrod’s greatest loyalty in Beleriand is Beleriand, in his oaths of fealty sworn to the High King and to Thingol. He would think they should know at once of any potential threat to or within Himring, for the sake of the great war against Morgoth. 

He’s a cousin, not a brother. He won’t keep it within the family. He doesn’t have the steel to do what might need to be done. 

Finrod would never dirty his hands with Eldar blood. He lives far enough south that he loses few if any of his followers to thraldlom, tucked away enough from danger that all he needs to do is bar the entrance to his hidden kingdom. Maglor and his brothers have never had that luxury.

So: Caranthir. Subtle as a battering ram, but powerful. 

“What a mess,” Caranthir says once Maglor has locked the door to Maedhros’s rooms behind them. There are the ruins of several trays of food that Maglor has had brought up, and there’s still old blood on the floor. To Maedhros, “You look like shit.”

“_Thank_ you, Caranthir!” Maedhros says, and shows his teeth. 

“I need you to read him,” Maglor says. “Tell me if he’s clean or not.”

Caranthir grunts. “Always the dirty work. Open up,” he tells Maedhros, sitting down heavily at the end of the bed. It’s probably exactly how he courted his late wife. 

Maedhros grimaces at him, but he takes a deep breath, and then they both go very still. Maglor keeps his own defences up, despite his desperate curiosity, and his hand on his sword hilt. He can’t tell, quite, what’s happening, but Caranthir is scowling, his eyes very focused. 

He’s felt Caranthir’s mind unleashed before, and he doesn’t envy Maedhros its singular attention, its brutal force. 

Finally,

“Nothing,” Caranthir says, sounding disgusted. “If he’s mad, it’s all him, nothing - no one - else.”

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” Maedhros says wearily. He jerks his chin at his belly.

“Who cut you up?”

“Who, indeed?”

“Be careful,” Maglor says, and Caranthir, scowling again, sets his hand on Maedhros’s sternum, just above the bandages.

“Lower,” Maedhros says.

Caranthir makes a face. “I’m not Fingon.”

“_Moryo._” 

Gingerly, Caranthir moves his hand to Maedhros’s abdomen, barely skimming the surface, afraid to hurt his brother by pressing harder. Then he closes his eyes, and extends his mind like a spreading net, one made of wire: whatever he catches will be caught, and if necessary crushed. 

He spends much longer on this one. Then,

“You got something in there, all right,” Caranthir says. “Something alive.”

“But it’s not in his head,” Maglor says. It’s not quite a question – he trusts Caranthir – but he needs to know his brother’s not _completely_ mad, even if Maedhros is trying to make this nightmare bearable by convincing himself it’s benign. They might be able to destroy the thing without destroying him. He might not have to give his brother his quietus.

“No.”

“No,” Maedhros agrees.

“What is it?”

“Hell if I know,” Caranthir says.

“You want it gone,” Maglor reminds Maedhros. 

“_I want Sauron destroyed more.”_

__

__

Maglor says, to Caranthir, laughing without humour, “He thinks it’s Sauron’s bane!”

Maedhros says, to Caranthir, “I dreamed it.”

“He’s _never_ had foresight,” Maglor says – still to Caranthir.

“Shut up!” Caranthir says, to both of them. “It doesn’t feel dark, Maglor, but there’s not much to feel. Maedhros, if it’s not dark, what is it? How else can it be?”

-

They’re still at an impasse, still fighting, days later, when Fingon comes. Having Caranthir there has relieved Maglor to some extent, giving him time to wash, sleep, eat, even think. Yet having Caranthir there is also like having a stone in his shoe, a constant niggling annoyance, and much as sharing the watch upon Maedhros has helped, he still fears leaving Carathir too much alone with their eldest brother, still silver-tongued even in his harshness; their leader, their once-King.

He doesn’t know what Maedhros’s plan is, whether Maedhros even believes what he’s claiming. Maglor doesn’t trust him. He can’t.

Fingon comes without fanfare, without trumpets and standards or a shining guard worthy of the High King’s oldest son. He's nondescript in deep hood and cloak until the moment he reaches Himring, whereupon he tears both back and cries “Take me to him!”

Himring’s garrison seem torn between relief and terror at seeing him back so soon. Maglor is torn between relief and terror himself. He wants to embrace Fingon, and he wants to wring his neck for his lack of discretion.

“Cousin!” he says, blocking Fingon's path, and seizes his hands in semblance of a greeting. That should calm the men slightly, assure them this is still a family affair, not a military or political one. 

Maglor doesn’t know whether he’s invited in a potential ally or enemy. He knew Fingon would be on his side, in the moment Maglor had sent for him: Fingon would fight Morgoth with his bare hands before he let Maedhros hurt or harm himself. But he could become an enemy now, because if Maedhros truly believes or has been made to believe that the thing is benign, Fingon might take his side and protect it. Fingon is no mean warrior, and all but unbeatable when he considers a battle a righteous one.

“Cousin,” Fingon says impatiently. He’s shining slightly in the thin sunshine, the sun gleaming on the gold woven through his dark hair and making love to his golden-brown skin. His dark brows are bent in a frown. “Why are you in my way?”

“I need to talk to you first,” Maglor says, and starts to fill him in in quick, hushed tones. Before he’s halfway through, Fingon shoves him aside and starts up the stairs two at a time.

-

By the time Maglor catches him up, Fingon is standing by Maedhros’s bedside, determinedly sawing at the bindings with his dagger. 

“Fingon!” Maglor exclaims. “What are you _doing_?”

The stump lashed to Maedhros’s side comes free.

“Do you think I’d let you – let _anyone_ – chain him up again?” Fingon asks fiercely.

“It’s to protect him,” Maglor says. “He would have killed or disembowelled himself if I hadn’t,” but although it pauses, the dagger still slices decisively through the tie left around Maedhros’s wrist. 

Maglor and Caranthir both tense, but Maedhros only stretches his fingers out and then rotates his wrist. He doesn’t spring to his feet or wrestle Fingon for the dagger, but he raises his eyebrows sardonically at Maglor.

Fingon sheathes his dagger, drops to his knees, and reaches out to take Maedhros’s raw wrists in his hands. 

“Maitimo,” he says, pained.

“You’d do better looking at his gut.” Caranthir.

“In a moment,” Fingon says, and presses his lips to Maedhros’s palm.

It’s profoundly embarrassing. Maglor knows what they are to each other, but he’s never witnessed anything between them that couldn’t occur in the middle of Fingolfin’s court before: nothing so terribly obvious.

“It’s all right,” Maedhros says, and his harsh voice is oddly gentle. He turns his hand in Fingon’s grip to grip his in turn. “Come and sit beside me.” 

Caranthir has gone brick-red. “If you kiss his belly better, too, I’m leaving.”

“Shut _up_, Moryo,” Fingon says, and rises. He lets Maedhros take his hand and put it to his stomach, over the wound.

“What do you feel?”

“Cloth?” Fingon says.

“With your _mind,_” Maedhros says, looking a little pained himself. Then his eyes flicker silver to the dagger in the sheath hanging from Fingon’s belt, measuring.

In that moment, Maglor understands: Maedhros does believe his own preposterous story, but he’s not entirely, not completely certain yet. Take that dream from him, and his remedy will be what it was before. And Fingon will protect him from his own brothers as they try to save him from himself, until the moment it’s too late; and then Maglor will be left with the mess, the dead, the betrayal, yet again.

“My – _what_?” Fingon says, because he hadn’t bothered to wait for Maglor’s briefing. 

He is very handsome, their glorious cousin, and brave as a lion, but not always as swift of thought as he is of foot. He’s not stupid by any means, but he doesn’t think around corners the way Fëanor’s sons learned to, never worries about showing his working before he comes up with an answer, isn’t always looking over his shoulder. 

Fingon keeps his hand spread on Maedhros’s stomach, and then his blue-grey eyes go hazy. His dark brows come together again. Like Caranthir, he’s feeling – _something_ – that illusive wisp that had darted out of Maglor’s grasp, that turned to mist in Caranthir’s net. His lip disappears between his teeth. 

Then his eyebrows shoot up and he turns to stare at Maedhros, the strangest look on his face. “No!”

“Apparently,” Maedhros says, grimly amused.

“_How?_”

“I can only imagine,” Maedhros says. Then he grips Fingon’s shoulder, like a commander with a raw soldier who needs to be braced. “Fingon. To some extent, Sauron is behind it; he must be. He _altered_ me, in some way – opened the door. I don’t doubt he meant to do great ill by it, but his work wasn’t done when Morgoth hung me from Thangorodrim. And I think – no, I _know_ – that that door being open, light entered rather than darkness. It’s how Eru likes to work; or so we are told.”

It’s blasphemy on a level that their father would probably be proud of. _No theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite: for he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined._ Eru moves to make light out of darkness, to take wrong and make right, to weave new harmonies out of dissonance.

It might even be true. More likely it's a pretty rationalisation Maedhros is spinning for his beloved, to soften the harsh truths and edges of Thangorodrim, to make a horrible accident seem like something beautiful. Maedhros would soften anything he could for Fingon.

Caranthir makes a retching noise. 

Maglor ignores him. “I need to you to tell me clearly exactly what it is that you sense, Fingon. It’s important.”

“A child – _my_ child. I can feel its fëa reaching out to mine. Can’t you?” Fingon asks Maedhros, for whom nothing is that simple, that easily trusted. 

“Yes,” Maedhros says, as though Fingon’s confirmation has cut through all the tortured knots in his head. “_That’s_ what I’ve been feeling.”

“_Ugh_,” Caranthir says. If it’s possible, he’s gone redder. “That's _how_ you got the parasite – ugh, I don’t even want to _think_ about – _ugh_. He’s our _cousin_!”

“Shut up, Moryo,” Maglor says. He looks hard at Maedhros. _Are you lying even now?_

A small shake of the head.

Fingon says, all in a flurry, "I’m so sorry – and so – well, I would be glad of it if you were – Maitimo, is _that_ why?”, and his eyes fall to the bandages with renewed horror.

“Oh, I’m very glad,” Maedhros says. It might be a tender affirmation, while their hands are laced together over their child, but the words are hard and gloating. His expression has sharpened like it is when he’s in battle: eyes aflame, top lip drawn back. “Sauron has crafted one of the cogs in his downfall without knowing it. I dreamed it,” he adds, and then his face does soften a little, just for Fingon. “I saw his face. I saw his future.”

“If it’ll help the War,” Caranthir says grudgingly. 

“What did you see?” Fingon asks, and Maglor expects to hear a recitation of starry eyes and starry shields.

But Maedhros says, still viciously glad, “Fire.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am a monster? also a little mad? certainly possessed.


End file.
